What is a Peer-Reviewed Journal?

Today’s Ask Dr. Diane: My professor told me I have to cite using scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. What does that mean?

College students are often asked to include scholarly peer-reviewed journals as sources for citations. If the school offers an online library, it can be easy to search for these journals by simply marking the box under the search line that lists something like “search for peer-reviewed journals only” or “scholarly peer-reviewed”. By marking this box, anything that comes up in the search should be appropriate to use for college-level assignments.

A peer-reviewed journal insures that the article is of the highest quality and reflects sound research. Library.usm.main.edu does a nice job of explaining the peer review process:

Articles submitted by authors are evaluated by a group of peer experts in the field.

The reviewers recommend whether the submitted article be published, revised, or rejected.

This review process is often performed “blind”, meaning the reviewers do not know the names or academic affiliations of the authors, and the authors do not know who is reviewing their work.

What is meant by scholarly journals? CalPoly explained, “Scholarly journals contain articles written by, and addressed to, experts in a discipline. They are concerned with academic study, especially research, and demonstrate the methods and concerns of scholars. The main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report original research or experimentation and to communicate this information to the rest of the scholarly world. The language of scholarly journals reflects the discipline covered, as it assumes some knowledge or background on the part of the reader. Scholarly journals always rigorously cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies. Many scholarly journals are published by professional organizations.”